Conventionally, multiple vital signs monitors are installed and used at fixed locations, bedside, in clinics and hospitals. They typically are not battery-operated, requiring instead power and input/output (I/O) cords and cables, and are made to be affixed to a bedside or other bedside equipment. Often, such multiple vital signs monitors are bulky, e.g. weighing up to one hundred pounds, and thus are impossible or at least very difficult to transport more than a few feet by hospital staff or contractors.
Conventional single vital sign monitors may be portable and relatively lightweight, but provide limited versatility, permitting the monitoring of only one patient vital sign, e.g. ECG (e.g. as measured by skin-contact, resistance-measuring electrodes) or blood pressure (preferably non-invasive BP--e.g. as measured by an inflatable, limb-encircling, artery-occluding pressure cuff) or blood-oxygen level (e.g. as measured by pulse oximetry or SpO.sub.2), which it will be appreciated by those of skill in the art require relatively low bandwidths to provide diagnostic quality data. Known portable ECG monitors support only three-lead ECG monitoring, which is less reliable than twelve-lead monitoring. Some single vital sign monitors provide for real-time telemetry to a remote location of such monitored data, but do not provide for local, integral storage of such vital sign data for later outplay. By real time, it will be appreciated that minimization of the time delay between the talking of a patient vital sign measurement and the receipt thereof in usable form at a remote site by a physician or diagnostic technician is needed for high-quality patient care, and that such delay or latency preferably is on the order of a second, and preferably far less, and is no more than a very few seconds.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,333,616 entitled WRIST-WORN ECG MONITOR describes such a portable ECG monitor; U.S. Pat. No. 4,967,756 entitled BLOOD PRESSURE AND HEART RATE MONITORING METHOD AND APPARATUS describes such a BP monitor; and co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/556,468 entitled CONCURRENT MEDICAL PATIENT DATA AND VOICE COMMUNICATION METHOD AND APPARATUS, issued Jan. 6, 1998, as U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,364, describes tele-monitoring over the public switched telephone network (PSTN). All are commonly owned herewith, and the disclosures of these patents and this application are incorporated herein by this reference.